Pictorial image multiplication within an optical device has proven as illusive to inventors as the illusion they hoped to create.
Pictorial image multiplication has intrigued man since the invention of the mirror. What child hasn't stood for hours in front of an old fashioned hinged three mirror dresser and amused himself for hours multiplying his image. The first writings we can find on the subject occur in Magia Naturalis, book, VII, ch. 2, where Baptista Porta described the effect of two plane mirrors as a machine for multiplying images. An explanation of this phenomenon was explained as early as the year 1646 by Kircher in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, p. 890. He explained the relation between the number of images and the inclination (angle of incidence) of the two mirrors. Propositions in Harris' Optics and Wood's Optics relate to the multiplication and circular arrangement of the apertures or sectors formed by the inclined mirrors, and to the progress of a ray of light reflected between two inclined or parallel mirrors.
Sir David Brewster in the year 1814 combined these teachings with his own research on light polarization by successive reflections between plates of glass and developed and subsequently patented in England an optical instrument the kaleidoscope. Brewster's kaleidoscope was capable of receiving into the direct viewing sector colors, abstract outlines, shapes, and patterns which were multiplied symmetrically but he was unable to overlay multiple pictorial images. In 1819, Brewster published his Treatise on the Kaleidoscope which documents his discoveries and refinements of the Instrument; among these, the telescopic and microscopic kaleidoscopes, the polyangular, parallel, and the polycentral kaleidoscopes. Brewster was able to optically reduce and focus images from the immediate environment onto the direct viewing sector but he was restricted to focusing on a single image, and multiplying that image. He was unable to overlay or place in juxtaposition two different pictorial images and multiply both of them.
Bickerton and O'Halloran, British Pat. No. 21,006 (1913) patented an improved kaleidoscope capable of mutliplying a single pictorial image beyond the end of the devie. This device, like Brewster's could not multiply a plurality of pictorial objects outside the device, nor could it multiply even a single pictorial object mounted within the object cell of the device.
Burnside, U.S. Pat. No. Re. 26,031, 1966, patented a kaleidoscope which could also view objects lying within the field of direct view of the user of the instrument such as clouds, houses, people and works of art, but again the objects were not contained within the instrument itself.